Kitabı oku: «The Mark Of Cain», sayfa 12

“Watching for you! What do you mean?”

“Just take a look round the square, and tell me whether any suspicious character is about.”

Young Wright, much puzzled, put on his hat, and stood lighting a cigarette on the outer steps.

“Not a soul in sight but lawyers’ clerks,” he reported.

“Very well; just tell your father that, as it is a fine morning, you are taking a turn with me.”

Barton’s friend did as he wished, and presently the pair had some serious conversation.

“I’ll do exactly as you suggest, and explain to my father,” said the young lawyer as they separated.

“Thanks; it is so much easier for you to explain than for a stranger like myself,” said Barton, and strolled westward by way of Co vent Garden.

At the noted establishment of Messrs. Aminadab, theatrical costumiers, Barton stopped, went in, was engaged some time with the Messrs. Aminadab, and finally had a cab called for him, and drove home with a pretty bulky parcel.

At five minutes to twelve on the following day, a tall, burly, mahogany-colored mariner, attired, for the occasion, in a frock-coat and hat, appeared in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He seemed to be but ill acquainted with those coasts, and mooned about for some minutes before he reached the door of Messrs. Wright Then he rang, the door was opened, and he was admitted into the presence of the partners.

“I have come, gentlemen, in answer to your letter,” he said with a Northern burr, bowing awkwardly, and checking a disposition to salute by touching his forelock.

His eyes wandered round the room, where he saw no one but the partners, with whom he was already acquainted, and a foreign-looking gentleman – a gentleman with hay-colored hair, a soft hat, spectacles, and a tow-colored beard. He had a mild, short-sighted expression, a pasty complexion, and the air of one who smoked too much.

“Good morning, Mr. – h’m – Mr. Johnson,” said old Mr. Wright. “As we told you, sir, we have, as a necessary preliminary to the inquiry, requested Professor Lieblein to step in and inspect – h’m – the personal marks of which you spoke. Professor Lieblein, of Bonn, is a great authority on these matters – author of ‘Die Tattuirung,’ a very learned work, I am told.”

Thus introduced, the Professor bowed.

“Glad to meet you, sir,” said the sailor-man gruffly, “or any gentleman as really knows what’s what.”

“You have been a great traveller, sir?” said the learned Professor, whose Teutonic accent it is superfluous to reproduce. “You have in many lands travelled? So!”

“Yes, sir; I have seen the world.”

“And you are much tattooed: it is to me very interesting. You have by many races been decorated?”

“Most niggers have had a turn at me, sir!”

“How happy you are to have had such experiences! Now, the Burmese – ah! have you any little Burmese marks?”

“Yes, sir; from the elbow to the shoulder,” replied the seafaring man. “Saving your presence, I’ll strip to the buff.”

“The buff! What is that? Oh, thank you, sir,” this was in reply to young Mr. Wright “The naked body! why, buff! ‘Buff,’ the abstract word, the actual stuff, the very wesen of man unclothed. ‘Buffer,’ the concrete man, in the ‘buff,’ in the flesh; it is sehr intéressant.”

While the learned Professor muttered these metaphysical and philological reflections, the seaman was stripping himself to the waist.

“That’s the Burmese style, sir,” he said, pointing to his shoulders and upper arm.

These limbs were tattooed in a beautiful soft blue; the pattern was a series of diminishing squares, from which long narrow triangles ran down to the elbow-joints.

“Sehr schôn, sehr schôn,” exclaimed the delighted Professor. “It is very hubsch, very pretty, very well. We cannot now decorate, we Germans. Ach, it is mournful!” and he sighed. “And now, sir, have you to show me any moko? A little moko would be very instructive.”

“Moko? Rather! The Maori pattern, you mean; the New Zealand dodge? Just look between my shoulders,” and the seaman turned a broad bare back, whereon were designs of curious involuted spirals.

“That is right, that is right,” whispered the Professor. “Moko, schlange, serpent-marks, so they call it in their tongue. Better moko, on an European man, have I never seen. You observe,” he remarked to the elder Mr. Wright, waving his hand as he followed the tattooed lines – “you observe the serpentine curves? Very beautiful.”

“Extremely interesting,” said Mr. Wright, who, being no anthropologist, seemed nervous and uncomfortable.

“Corresponds, too, with the marks in the picture,” he added, comparing the sketch of the original Shields with the body of the claimant.

“Are you satisfied now, governor?” asked the sailor.

“One little moment. Have you on the Red Sea coast been? Have you been at Suakim? Have you any Arab markings?”

“Oh, yes; here you are!” and the voyager pointed to his breast.

The Professor inspected, with unconcealed delight, some small tattooings of irregular form.

“It is, it is,” he cried, “the wasm, the sharat,² the Semitic tribal mark, the mark with which the Arab tribes brand their cattle! Of old time they did tattoo it on their bodies. The learned Herr Professor Robertson Smith, in his leedle book, do you know what he calls that very mark, my dear sir?”

“Not I,” said the sailor; “I’m no scholar.”

“He says it was – I do not say he is right,” cried the Professor, in a loud voice, pointing a finger at his victim’s breast – “he says it was the mark of cain!”

The sailor, beneath his mahogany tan, turned a livid white, and grasped at a bookcase by which he stood.

“What do you mean?” he cried, through his chattering teeth; “what do you mean with your damned Hebrew-Dutch and your mark of Cain? The mark’s all right! A Hadendowa woman did it in Suakim years ago. Ain’t it on that chart of yours?”

“Certainly, good sir; it is,” answered the Professor. “Why do you so agitate yourself? The proof is complete!” he added, still pointing at the sailor’s breast.

“Then I’ll put on my togs, with your leave: it’s none so warm!” grumbled the man.

He had so far completed his dressing that he was in his waistcoat, and was just looking round for his coat.

“Stop!” said the Professor. “Hold Mr. Johnson’s coat for a moment!”

This was to young Wright, who laid his hands on the garment in question.

“You must be tired, sir,” said the Professor, in a very soft voice. “May I offer you a leedle cigarette?”

He drew from his pocket a silver cigarette-case, and, in a thoroughly English accent, he went on:

“I have waited long to give you back your cigarette-case, which you left at your club, Mr. Thomas Cranley!”

The sailor’s eye fell on it. He dashed the silver box violently to the ground, and trampled on it, then he made one rush at his coat.

“Hold it, hold it!” cried Barton, laying aside his Teutonic accent – “hold it: there’s a revolver in the pocket!”

But there was no need to struggle for the coat.

The sailor had suddenly staggered and fallen, a crumpled but not unconscious mass, on the floor.

“Call in the police!” said Barton. “They’ll have no difficulty in taking him.”

“This is the man against whom you have the warrant,” he went on, as young Wright opened the door and admitted two policemen. “I charge the Honorable Thomas Cranley with murder!”

The officers lifted the fallen man.

“Let him be,” said Barton. “He has collapsed. Lay him on the floor: he’s better so. He needs a turn of my profession: his heart’s weak. Bring some brandy.”

Young Wright went for the spirits, while the frightened old lawyer kept murmuring:

“The Honorable Thomas Cranley was always very unsatisfactory!”

It had been explained to the old gentleman that an impostor would be unmasked, and a criminal arrested; but he had not been informed that the culprit was the son of his great client, Lord Birkenhead.

Barton picked up the cigarette-case, and as he, for the first time, examined its interior, some broken glass fell out and tinkled on the floor.

CHAPTER XVI. – The Verdict of Fate

Maitland did not dally long in the Levant after getting Barton’s letter. He was soon in a position to receive, in turn, the congratulations which he offered to Margaret and Barton with unaffected delight.

Mrs. St. John Deloraine and he understood each other!

Maitland, for perhaps the first time in his life, was happy in a thoroughly human old-fashioned way.

Meanwhile the preparations for Cranley’s trial dragged on. Interest, as usual, was frittered away in examinations before the magistrates.

But at last the day of judgment shone into a court crowded as courts are when it is the agony of a gentleman that the public has to view.

When the prisoner, uttering his last and latest falsehood, proclaimed himself “Not Guilty,” his voice was clear and strong enough, though the pallor of his face attested, not only the anxiety of his situation, but the ill-health which, during his confinement, had often made it doubtful whether he could survive to plead at the bar of any earthly judgment.

The Counsel for the Crown, opening the case, stated the theory of the prosecution, the case against Cranley. His argument is here offered in a condensed form:

First, Counsel explained the position of Johnson, or Shields, as the unconscious heir of great wealth, and set forth his early and late relations with the prisoner, a dishonored and unscrupulous outcast of society. The prisoner had been intimately acquainted with the circumstances of Johnson’s early life, with his history and his home. His plan, therefore, was to kill him, and then personate him. A celebrated case, which would be present to the minds of the jury, proved that a most plausible attempt at the personation of a long-missing man might be made by an uneducated impostor, who possessed none of the minute local and personal knowledge of the prisoner. Now, to personate Johnson, a sailor whose body was known to have been indelibly marked by the tattooing of various barbarous races, it was necessary that the prisoner should be similarly tattooed. It would be shown that, with unusual heartlessness, he had persuaded his victim to reproduce on his body the distinctive marks of Johnson, and then had destroyed him with fiendish ingenuity, in the very act of assuming his personality. The very instrument, it might be said, which stamped Cranley as Johnson, slew Johnson himself, and the process which hallmarked the prisoner as the heir of vast wealth stigmatized him with the brand of Cain. The personal marks which seemed to establish the claimant’s case demonstrated his guilt He was detected by the medical expert brought in to prove his identity, and was recognized by that gentleman, Dr. Barton, who would be called, and who had once already exposed him in a grave social offence – cheating at cards. The same witness had made a post-mortem examination of the body of Richard Johnson, and had then suspected the method by which he had been murdered.

The murder itself, according to the theory of the prosecution, was committed in the following manner: Cranley, disguised as a sailor (tbe disguise in which he was finally taken), had been in the habit of meeting Johnson, and being tattooed by him, in a private room of the Hit or Miss tavern, in Chelsea. On the night of February 7th, he met him there for the last time. He left the tavern late, at nearly twelve o’clock, telling the landlady that “his friend,” as he called Johnson, had fallen asleep upstairs. On closing the establishment, the landlady, Mrs. Gullick, found the room, an upper one, with dormer windows opening on the roof, empty. She concluded that Johnson – or Shields, as she called him – had wakened, and left the house by the back staircase, which led to a side-alley. This way Johnson, who knew the house well, often took, on leaving. On the following afternoon, however, the dead body of Johnson, with no obvious marks of violence on it, was found in a cart belonging to the vestry – a cart which, during the night, had remained near a shed on the piece of waste ground adjoining the Hit or Miss. A coroner’s jury had taken the view that Johnson, being intoxicated, had strayed into the piece of waste ground (it would be proved that the door in the palisade surrounding it was open on that night), had lain down in the cart, and died in his sleep of cold and exposure. But evidence derived from a later medical examination would establish the presumption, which would be confirmed by the testimony of an eye-witness, that death had been wilfully caused by Cranley, employing a poison which it would be shown he had in his possession – a poison which was not swallowed by the victim, but introduced by means of a puncture into the system. The dead man’s body had then been removed to a place where his decease would be accounted for as the result of cold and exhaustion. A witness would be put in the box who, by an extraordinary circumstance, had been enabled to see the crime committed by the prisoner, and the body carried away, though, at the moment, he did not understand the meaning of what he saw. As the circumstances by which this witness had been enabled to behold what was done at dead of night, in an attic room, locked and bolted, and not commanded from any neighboring house nor eminence, were exceedingly peculiar, testimony would be brought to show that the witness really had enjoyed the opportunity of observation which he claimed.

On the whole, then, as the prisoner had undeniably personated Johnson, and claimed Johnson’s property; as he undeniably had induced Johnson, unconsciously, to aid him in the task of personation; as the motive for the murder was plain and obvious; as Johnson, according to the medical evidence, had probably been murdered; and as an eye-witness professed to have seen, without comprehending, the operation by which death, according to the medical theory, was caused, the counsel for the prosecution believed that the jury could find no other verdict than that the prisoner had wilfully murdered Richard Johnson on the night of February 7th.

This opened the case for the Crown. It is unnecessary to recapitulate the evidence of all the witnesses who proved, step by step, the statements of the prosecution. First was demonstrated the identity of Shields with Johnson. To do this cost enormous trouble and expense; but Johnson’s old crony, the man who drew the chart of his tattoo marks, was at length discovered in Paraguay, and, by his aid and the testimony he collected, the point was satisfactorily made out. It was, of course, most important in another respect, as establishing Margaret’s claims on the Linkheaton estate.

The discovery of the body of Johnson (or Shields) in the snow was proved by our old friends Bill and Tommy.

The prisoner was recognized by Mrs. Gullick as the sailor gentleman who had been with Johnson on the last night of his life. In spite of the difference of dress, and of appearance caused by the absence of beard – for Cranley was now clean shaved – Mrs. Gullick was positive as to his voice and as to his eyebrows, which were peculiarly black and mobile.

Barton, who was called next, and whose evidence excited the keenest interest, identified the prisoner as the man whom he had caused to be arrested in the office of Messrs. Martin and Wright, and whom he had known as Cranley. His medical evidence was given at considerable length, and need not be produced in full detail On examining the body of Richard Johnson, his attention had naturally been directed chiefly to the tattooings. He had for some years been deeply interested, as an ethnologist, in the tattooed marks of various races. He had found many curious examples on the body of the dead man. Most of the marks were obviously old; but in a very unusual place, generally left blank – namely, behind and under the right shoulder – he had discovered certain markings of an irregular character, clearly produced by an inexperienced hand, and perfectly fresh and recent. They had not healed, and were slightly discolored. They could not, from their position, possibly have been produced by the man himself. Microscopic examinations of these marks, in which the coloring matter was brown, not red or blue, as on the rest of the body, showed that this coloring matter was of a character familiar to the witness as a physiologist and scientific traveller. It was the Woorali, or arrow poison of the Macoushi Indians of Guiana.

Asked to explain the nature of this poison to the Court, the witness said that its “principle” (to use the term of the old medical writers) had not yet been disengaged by Science, nor had it ever been compounded by Europeans. He had seen it made by the Macoushi Indians, who combined the juice of the Woorali vine with that of certain bulbous plants, with certain insects, and with the poison-fangs of two serpents, boiling the whole amidst magical ceremonies, and finally straining off a thick brown paste, which, when perfectly dry, was used to venom the points of their arrows. The poison might be swallowed by a healthy man without fatal results. But if introduced into the system through a wound, the poison would act almost instantaneously, and defy analysis. Its effect was to sever, as it were, the connection between the nerves and the muscles, and the muscles used in respiration being thus gradually paralyzed, death followed within a brief time, proportionate to the size of the victim, man or animal, and the strength of the dose.

Traces of this poison, then, the witness had found in the fresh tattoo marks on Johnson’s body.

The witness now produced the sharp wooden needle, the stem of the leaf of the coucourite palm, which he had found among Johnson’s tattooing materials, in the upper chamber of the Hit or Miss. This needle had been, he said, the tip of one of the arrows used for their blowpipes, by the Macoushi of Guiana.

Barton also produced the Oriental silver cigarette-case, the instrument of his cheating at baccarat, which Cranley had left in the club on the evening of his detection. He showed that the case had contained a small crystal receptacle, intended to hold opium. This crystal had been broken by Cranley when he dashed down the case, in the office of Martin and Wright. But crumbs of the poison – “Woorali,” or “Ourali” – perfectly dry, remained in this réceptacle. It was thus clear that Cranley, himself a great traveller, was possessed of the rare and perilous drug.

The medical evidence having been heard, and confirmed in its general bearing by various experts, and Barton having stood the test of a severe cross-examination, William Winter was called.

There was a flutter in the Court, as a pale and partly paralyzed man was borne in on a kind of litter, and accommodated in the witness-box.

“Where were you,” asked the counsel for the prosecution, when the officer had sworn the witness, “at eleven o’clock on the night of February 7th?”

“I was on the roof of the Hit or Miss tavern.”

“On which part of the roof?”

“On the ledge below the dormer window at the back part of the house, facing the waste ground behind the plank fence.”

“Will you tell the Court what you saw while you were in that position?”

Winter’s face was flushed with excitement; but his voice, though thin, was clear as he said:

“There was a light streaming through the dormer window beside which I was lying, and I looked in.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw a small room, with a large fire, a table, on which were bottles and glasses, and two men, one seated, the other standing.”

“Would you recognize either man if you saw him?”

“I recognize the man who was seated, in the prisoner at the bar; but at that time he wore a beard.”

“Tell the Court what happened.”

“The men were facing me. One of them – the prisoner – was naked to the waist. His breast was tattooed. The other – the man who stood up – was touching him with a needle, which he applied, again and again, to a saucer on the table.”

“Could you hear what they said?”

“I could; for the catch of the lattice window had not caught, and there was a slight chink open.”

“You listened?”

“I could not help it; the scene was so strange. I heard the man with the needle give a sigh of relief, and say, ‘There, it’s finished, and a pretty job too, though I say it.’ The other said, ‘You have done it beautifully, Dicky; it’s a most interesting art. Now, just out of curiosity, let me tattoo you a bit.’ The other man laughed, and took off his coat and shirt while the other dressed. ‘There’s scarce an inch of me plain,’ he said, ‘but you can try your hand here,’ pointing to the lower part of his shoulder.”

“What happened then?”

“They were both standing up now. I saw the prisoner take out something sharp; his face was deadly pale, but the other could not see that. He began touching him with the sharp object, and kept chaffing all the time. This lasted, I should think, about five minutes, when the face of the man who was being tattooed grew very red. Then he swayed a little, backward and forward, then he stretched out his hands like a blind man, and said, in a strange, thick voice, as if he was paralyzed, ‘I’m very cold; I can’t shiver!’ Then he fell down heavily, and his body made one or two convulsive movements. That was all.”

“What did the prisoner do?”

“He looked like death. He seized the bottle on the table, poured out half a tumbler full of the stuff in it, drank it off, and then fell into a chair, and laid his face between his hands. He appeared ill, or alarmed, but the color came back into his cheek after a third or fourth glass. Then I saw him go to the sleeping man and bend over him, listening apparently to his breathing. Then he shook him several times, as if trying to arouse him. But the man lay like a log. Finally, about half-an-hour after what I have described, he opened the door and went out. He soon returned, took up the sleeping man in his arms – his weight seemed lighter than you would expect – and carried him out. From the roof I saw him push the door in the palisade leading into the waste land, a door which I myself had left open an hour before. It was not light enough to see what he did there; but he soon returned alone and walked away.”

Such was the sum of Winter’s evidence, which, if accepted, entirely corroborated Barton’s theory of the manner of the murder.

In cross-examination, Winter was asked the very natural question:

“How did you come to find yourself on the roof of the Hit or Miss late at night?”

Winter nearly rose from his litter, his worn faced flushed, his eye sparkling.

“Sir, I flew!”

There was a murmur and titter through the court, which was, of course, instantly suppressed.

“You flew! What do you mean by saying that you flew?”

“I am the inventor of a flying machine, which, for thirty years, I have labored at and striven to bring to perfection. On that one night, as I was experimenting with it, where I usually did, inside the waste land bordering on the Hit or Miss, the machine actually worked, and I was projected in the machine, as it were, to some height in the air, coming down with à fluttering motion, like a falling feather, on the roof of the Hit or Miss.”

Here the learned counsel for the defence smiled with infinite expression at the jury.

“My lord,” said the counsel for the prosecution, noting the smile, and the significant grin with which it was reflected on the countenances of the twelve good men and true, “I may state that we are prepared to bring forward a large mass of scientific evidence – including a well-known man of science, the editor of Wisdom, a popular journal which takes all knowledge for its province – to prove that there is nothing physically impossible in the facts deposed to by this witness. He is at present suffering, as you see, from a serious accident caused by the very machine of which he speaks, and which can be exhibited, with a working model, to the Court.”

“It certainly requires corroboration,” said the judge. “At present, so far as I am aware, it is contrary to scientific experience. You can prove, perhaps, that, in the opinion of experts, these machines have only to take one step further to become practical modes of locomotion. But that is the very step qui coûte. Nothing but direct evidence that the step has been taken – that a flying machine, on this occasion, actually flew (they appear to be styled volantes, a non volando) – would really help your case, and establish the credibility of this witness.”

“With your lordship’s learned remarks,” replied the counsel for the crown, “I am not the less ready to agree, because I have an actual eye-witness, who not only saw the flight deposed to by the witness, but reported it to several persons, who are in court, on the night of its occurrence, so that her statement, though disbelieved, was the common talk of the neighborhood.”

“Ah! that is another matter,” said the judge.

“Call Eliza Gullick,” said the counsel.

Eliza was called, and in a moment was curtsying, with eagerness, but perfect self-possession.

After displaying an almost technical appreciation of the nature of an oath, Eliza was asked:

“You remember the night of the 7th of February?”

“I remember it very well, sir.”

“Why do you remember it so well, Eliza?”

“Becos such a mort o’ things happened, sir, that night.”

“Will you tell his lordship what happened?”

“Certainly, my lord. Mr. Toopny gave us a supper, us himps, my lord, at the Hilarity; for he said – ”

“Never mind what he said, tell us what happened as you were coming home.”

“Well, sir, it was about eleven o’clock at night, and I was turning the lane into the Hit or Miss, when I heard an awful flapping and hissing and whirring, like wings working by steam, in the waste ground at the side of the lane. And, as I was listening – oh, it frightens me now to think of it – oh, sir – ”

“Well, don’t be alarmed, my good child! What occurred?”

“A great thing like a bird, sir, bigger than a man, flew up over my head, higher than the houses. And then – did you ever see them Japanese toys, my lord, them things with two feathers and a bit of India-rubber as you twist round and round and toss them up and they fly – ”

“Well, my girl, I have seen them.”

“Well, just as if it had been one of them things settling down, the bird’s wings turned round and fluttered and shook, and at last it all lighted, quite soft like, on the roof of our house, the Hit or Miss. And there I saw it crouching when I went to bed, and looked out o’ the window, but they wouldn’t none o’ them believe me, my lord.”

There was a dead silence in the Court as Eliza finished this extraordinary confirmation of Winter’s evidence, and wove the net inextricably round the prisoner.

Then the silence was broken by a soft crashing sound, as if something heavy had dropped a short distance on some hard object.

All present turned their eyes from staring at Eliza to the place whence the sound had come.

The prisoner’s head had fallen forward on the railing in front of him.

One of the officers of the Court touched him on the shoulder.

He did not stir. They lifted him. He moved not.

The faint heart of the man had fluttered with its last pulsation. The evidence had sufficed for him without verdict or sentence. As he had slain his victim, so Fate slew him, painlessly, in a moment!